A real-time digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) is one of the primary tools of engineers in the development of all kinds of electronic items. A high-bandwidth DSO is of particular use in the development of newer and faster items because the performance of the DSO must be higher than that of the electronic items in development. Thus, as the speed of various electronic items increases, so does the need for ever higher bandwidth DSOs. In an age of rapid speed increases of electronics, a high bandwidth oscilloscope is needed that can be developed and deployed quickly.
These desired increases in DSO performance produce a dilemma because the bandwidth of the DSO is mostly related to the speed of the front-end amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) used therein. These components are traditionally designed using custom application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). These ASICs, in turn, must be built utilizing the highest performance integrated circuit (IC) design processes available. Their development along with the design and development of the rest of the DSO must be designed in time for the DSO to be utilized for design and development activities utilizing chips designed with these fast processes. In other words, the DSO is preferably built in and using the same processes as the chips that the DSO is designed to test.                a. The fastest IC design processes are expensive and difficult to utilize when they are first introduced, especially for low volume IC production. Also, while new IC design processes tend to be optimized for digital IC development (such as the development of faster computers, serial data links, etc.), DSO front-end designs in particular utilize analog ICs.        
ASIC development has been becoming increasingly expensive, almost to a point whereby the huge development costs cannot be recaptured in a relatively low volume production area, such as the oscilloscope market.
Additionally, the development time for higher performance ASICs and the supporting hardware can be prohibitively long and cumbersome which can extensively delay the time to market for a product. As has been determined by the inventors of the present invention, as well as of by the inventors of the applications and patents to which this application claims priority and benefit, by using multiple channel combining through the digital bandwidth interleaving method with previously developed and deployed hardware, the time to market for a new higher performance oscilloscope can be significantly reduced.